"Tuning In": Sound Perception and Embodiment for Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) is a composer of electronic and experimental music that significantly impacted how we approach music as participants and scholars. Utilizing nontraditional forms of composition, her trailblazing Sonic Meditations (1971) adapted elements of the emerging somatics movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and invited the intuitive body into music performance and experience—ultimately opening the door for the “new musicologists” of the 1990s to actively accept bodily responses as a part of the music, as claimed by musicologist John Kapusta. Simultaneously, Oliveros used the somatic practices she learned, Kinetic Awareness and Tai Chi, to guide her relationship with listening and the eventual development of her practice, Deep Listening, whose name she coined in 1989. This thesis (1) traces consciousness, attention, and awareness specifically to document how these human states-of-being inform her mature definitions of hearing and listening; (2) highlights, from a historiographic position, Oliveros’ use of somatic movement principles; and (3) dialogues and reassess the frameworks that leading musicologists such as Kapusta have recently advanced in relation to Oliveros. All in all, in this thesis I posit that Pauline Oliveros is a foundational figure to the field of Sound Studies, and that her practice of Deep Listening reorients listening as a fully embodied experience, predating R. Murray Schafer’s groundbreaking work The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World in 1994.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Music

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Music

Grantor

Texas State University

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Plummer, Breanna

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Pedroza, Ludim

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Mooney, Kevin E.
• Denis, John

• Oliveros
• listening
• hearing
• embodiment
• somatics
• meditation
• attention
• awareness
• sound studies

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10877/20107

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digital.library.txst.edu:10877/20107